Holiday snapshots
In my post a few days ago about filters I mentioned that I had a fair few photos from my holiday that were not real good. A lot had very little detail due to the very bright conditions in NZ.
Today, I grabbed one of the photos that I liked and spent a little bit of time working on it.
As I shoot in RAW I can normally do a fair bit with an image. The first thing to do with any RAW image is to just do some simple adjustments of the Exposure compensation both up and down to see if you can actually extract info from the highlights and shadow areas.
The un-corrected image that I started with had extremes in both highlights and shadows as seen below. There is almost no detail in the sky (highlights) or the shadows (foreground)
The photo was taken around 7pm at one of the Northern Beaches in Auckland.
I did actually try a few shots at various settings - all without using any filters. The other shots I had I was not able to adjust the Exposure compensation and get reasonable details across all parts of the image.
Now, The whole digital darkroom process that I took to whip the above photo into something much more appealing to me.
Firstly, I made minor corrections to the image and developed a tif file. Then I set the Exposure compensation to about -2 and adjusted it to get as much detail out of the highlights (sky) as possible. I ended up settling at -1.6. I made a few other minor corrections and processed another tif. Then I set the exposure compensation at around +2 to get as much shadow detail as possible. I ended up at +2.1, a few monor tweaks and processed a 3rd tif.
Now I pulled out photomatix and loaded up the 3 processed tif images. photomatix will combine several pictures together to expand the dynamic range. I created an HDR (High Dynamic Range) image, and then adjusted various settings in the tone mapping in order to get me to a point where the sky, the rocks in the mid-ground and the very dark foreground rocks and tree brances were all visible with some reasonable detail in them. Once I was happy with the results I saved off the resulting image, but I was not finished yet as some of the colours were not quite right.
So, the Gimp was called into service to do some further corrections on the photo. I needed to correct a red cast to the sky, and a purple cast to the extreme foreground rocks.
So, a little bit of Levels adjustments of each colour channel was the first thing I did. Yes, I did get some improvements but I still needed to do more. So back into the menus to see what else was available. I then adjusted the Curves of each colour channel and made further progress.
Close, but more work required, so finally, I went and opened up the colour balance tools. Starting with the Shadows, I tweaked the colours, then I did the midtones and highlights. After going back and checking a few times I finally managed to get rid of the colour casts that I had.
At this stage, I saved out a snapshot of the image. Then, I did a resize of the image to the required size (using a bicubic option to resize) and finally, using the unsharp mask adjusted the sharpness to get a pleasing image for the screen.
After all of this work, I finally produced an image that is far-removed from the original, but far more pleasing to me!
The end result is an image that has both highlight and shadow detail and does not look too unnatural like some HDR images can.
